New House: Month One

We moved into our first home one month ago.

It's a nice little home for our family.  We chose a home well-within our current means with the idea of not taking 30 years to pay it off.  Also, with the idea that, since we finally have a real income, we'd like to be able to have some of that income available to make plans with and do things along the way to paying off the mortgage as well.  

That said--the home is a bit of a fixer-upper.  It's totally livable and we are so happy to have it.  We just also have lots of ideas for improving it.  

The project that I din't think would be first, but ended up being first, was some stripey wallpaper in the extra room.  

On day two, Jeremy said, "That's gonna be the first thing to go!" 

I was surprised, as I never dreamt of keeping the wallpaper, but hadn't realized it bothered him so much.  

On night three Owen was sitting in the reading chair in that room and said, "It's making me dizzy." And truth be told, it was sort of like one of those mind bender puzzles, "look at the dot in the center and watch as the outside begins to appear to swirling around the center point like a washing machine!"

So right then and there I started peeling off the wallpaper.  It took two nights and left a completely unfinished, unplastered, drywall with joint-compounded-seams wall. After a few days I searched the shelves in the garage and came up with some beige paint plus primer, and started painting.  

It looks much better now--in that "different colored accent wall" kind of way.  And it's perfect for waiting out further plans.

Then I tried hanging up our flower alphabet cards (as this is our "dining-turned-computer/school/reading room off of the kitchen), but since living in Texas requires ceiling fans running at full blast, half the cards fell down by the end of the first day.  It's now been two weeks and the rest have stayed put, so. . . apparently I need to come up with a plan to get the first ones back on the wall.

But the wallpaper removal and painting are all we have done so far inside the house.  We've done a lot more outside the house, though.

We have a 1/3 acre lot.

That's one of the reasons we bought an older house as well.  Newer houses are on much smaller lots, and have HOA's--Bleh!

The lot was one of the most important factors in choosing a house for us.  And we ended up finding a home on a third acre, mostly open lot.

After watching the neighborhood hummingbirds fight over our feeder of imitation nectar, we figured we could put in an actual pollinator garden for them.

This is the beginnings of that (with cardboard mulch to kill the grass) and I have already seen a hummingbird at that tall one in the center with the small orange flowers!

Speaking of killing grass. . . I layed out three beds for raised garden space.  It's time to be planting already, but I have plenty of experience with fall gardening and season-extending, so I'm not worried about it yet--just being patient.

This is the beginnings of our permaculture swale and berm food forest.  (More on that another day.) Jeremy and I placed our first order from a Texas nursery for trees and other edible perennials last week during a free shipping sale, but they won't come until planting season--probably November.

And this is the beginning of a homemade play structure.  We kind of planned something out, and Jeremy went and bought the wood, but came home with a bit of sticker shock.  So we looked up the cheapest play structure on Walmart.com and proved to ourselves that we were indeed doing it significantly cheaper as a DIY.  

The plan is to erect it under this oak tree, so that it is not really a "tree fort" but a fort up under the canopy of the tree--still fun?  We hope so. 

And those are our accomplishments of month one as homeowners. 

Pizza Plant

A great laugh-out-loud moment in a favorite movie of ours, WALL-E, is when the captain, who has spent his whole life on a space ship learns about earth.

He exclaims, "AUTO! Earth is amazing! These are called 'farms'. Humans would put seeds in the ground, pour water on them, and they grow food - like, pizza!"

Well apparently he wasn't too far from the truth.  We planted a few "pizza plants" when we got to our summer home.

OK, actually just basil.  But we've called basil "pizza plant" in our little family for quite a few years, and apparently we're not the only ones that consider it such.

The smell of fresh basil just makes us imagine a chewy crust, bright tomato sauce, and gooey mozzarella cheese along with it.

This is where we planted our pizza plants, in an overgrown herb garden on the property.  It has square tiles that make us think that it was originally planted in one of those cute checkerboard plantings, but the perennial herbs have grown unchecked throughout the entire plot.

The tall herbs in the back (and everywhere) is oregano--which is great in our pizza sauce.  The lower herb to the middle right, that looks pretty brown, is thyme--also good in the pizza sauce.  Rosemary would also be good in it, but there was just a bunch of dead rosemary where the bare dirt is.

The grey dead leaves in the middle are sage, but just down from them are a decent patch of still-living sage.  Most of our recipes for sage are to accompany sweet potatoes, but apparently it's a good match with turkey as well.

We've cleaned out quite a bit of this bed already, but we have a bit more work to get it looking really nice.  We're just super excited to have a space to grow some herbs this summer.  And definitely excited to make lot's of homemade pizza.

Spring on the Backyard Farm

 Our city farming chores began this spring with re-queening our beehive.  The colony successfully survived it's second winter, which makes us happy, and content with our version of beekeeping that is a little more hands-off than many beekeepers.  However, after the swarming and subsequent self-re-queening that occurred last summer, we ended up with a pretty  grouchy colony in the fall.  Our first attempts to check in on them this spring reconfirmed their general anti-social genepool so we made the decision to re-queen.

We ordered our new queen and tried to keep her alive long enough for it to stop raining so we could do the ol' switcheroo.  What we needed to do was systematically go through the hive to find the old queen, dispatch her, leave the hive queen-less for two days until they were getting nervous about not having a queen around, then introduce the new queen causing a wave of relief amid the bees to increase their likelihood of "accepting" her. 

We don't use marked queens, so in our three seasons of beekeeping, we've only seen our queen one other time, so we knew it was going to be difficult to find her.  Adding to that the grouchy (read: sting-happy) colony, and poor spring weather we knew we were in for quite the needle in a haystack hunt.  But we suited up, ultimately prevailed, and I was the only one that ended up getting stung.  (On my big belly of course, because I couldn't button up my bee shirt over the baby!)  But, the colony is now busily buzzing away for the season.

 The chickens all weathered the winter fine and began laying again mid-February.  But mid-March we went on vacation for spring break.  We were only going to be gone a few days so we simply filled up the chickens' water and food and left.  We came back to a big pile of 14 eggs in the laying box, and thought it had all gone off smoothly.

 Until we realized that the two bantams (our 3rd-year mini-hens) wouldn't leave the nesting box, and had stopped laying their little miniature eggs.  That big pile of eggs in the nesting box made their mothering instincts kick into gear, so all they could think about was raising baby chicks.  So they stopped laying eggs, and would sit all day in the nesting box trying to hatch the (unfertilized) eggs the other hens were laying.

Florence finally broke out of this broody nonsense about 4-5 weeks after we got back, but Gertrude, here, is still going strong in her broodiness.  We may have to take some drastic measures (more drastic than me going out a couple of times a day and just tossing her out into the run off the laying box) to get her to knock it off.

Since we don't know how long we'll be here we didn't get any laying hen chicks this year--but it's really hard to resist those baby chicks at the farm store.   Jeremy decided he really wanted to raise a few meat birds instead.  So we just picked up the one breed our store carried--the Cornish Cross.

We were already a bit morally opposed to the breed (they're the ones that have been bred to grow so quickly that they often die of heart attacks before reaching their 7-week accelerated maturation date because their hearts just can't keep up), but after raising them we are even more certain that we would never buy that breed again.  The crazy thing is, they not only grow too fast for their heart, but I think they grow too fast for their brains too!  They were so stupid--for lack of a better word--but when you thought about it, it made sense because they were really just baby chicks still, but had the bodies of full-grown chickens.

They just seemed a little more sickly as well.  We never put them around the other chickens--there's a risk of the chicks having disease from their hatchery, so since they weren't going to be permanent members of the flock, we didn't risk putting them together.  They had really watery droppings.  But once they got big enough that we let them start wandering the yard a little bit (so they were eating grass and things) their droppings solidified.  That just reconfirmed the validity of some of our chicken-raising practices as well. 

Sadly, (icky real-life stuff ahead warning) we came home from church last week to find the chickens had been attacked.  Our best guess is it was a yappy- neighborhood dog, because it attacked all four of them, they were all wounded on their back-sides (like they were running away from something), but it wasn't actually able to kill any of them--it left that job for Jeremy and me.  So, we processed the birds, cutting the meat away from their nipped backsides, freezing the rest, and making stock from the carcasses. 

One of the saddest things about this is that one of the reasons we raise our own birds, is to give them a less traumatic existence and death than the commercial alternative.  We want them to live happily and die peacefully.  So, unfortunately this was not a calm, humane death for our chickens, we don't know how long they were out there wounded after being attacked.  But, these are the realities of keeping animals, and on a country farm it would just be foxes and hawks we'd be dealing with instead.  This simply is the reality of animal husbandry.

But these experiences do make us feel like we've earned the right to call ourselves backyard "farmers". 

 

And since we have no immediate plans to leave we added summer crops to our vegetable garden.   The peas, broccoli, cabbage, onions, and kale were already doing well, so we added tomatoes, peppers, basil, and some runner beans.  We will still be adding more, but this spring was really crazy.  We got snow 10 days after our "last annual frost date" this year!  So everything is a bit behind.

And who knows with the baby coming (this week, maybe? please!) this may be all the planting we get to this summer.  But, there's always fall crops!